Distrowatch MX-17 review

[ChrisUK]

Distrowatch MX-17 review

[azrielle]

Nice and thorough. One of very few to mention, much less use, MX-PI, and the first to mention FBReader.

[Pierre]

and there is the usual & expected good / bad points. .
- it should give MX another spike in the DW chart, though.

"One of the few areas where I think MX loses out to the big, mainstream Linux distributions is in beginner friendliness".
- it's still a fairly beginner / friendliness Linux System - as far as I'm concerned, though.

[asqwerth]

Also, the review gives the impression that apart from things like browsers and kernels (which he called "key components"), the applications in MX repos are all "old' or rather, Debian Stable packages.

Otherwise, it's a pretty positive review.

[richb]

Very thorough and positive. I wish he had mentioned the manual where a beginner can learn about the concepts that he indicated made MX somewhat less beginner friendly.

[bwich12]

"One of the few areas where I think MX loses out to the big, mainstream Linux distributions is in beginner friendliness".
- it's still a fairly beginner / friendliness Linux System - as far as I'm concerned, though.

I've read the review as well and I agree with the reviewer.

There's beginners and then there's beginners. Somebody who's not an IT professional and has no experience whatsoever with Linux will probably not be able to set things up with MX. Case in point, my mother-in-law. She's 81, fairly computer-literate as these things go (meaning she is a low-wattage Office user, daily uses her browser, reads and answers her emails etc.) Some stuff she can install and set up on her own if it's simple but even such a basic thing as changing the default file save format in LO is beyond her.

I convinced her a while ago to try MX16 (as she was not happy about the way Windows 10 was portrayed in some of the media). With some trepidation she agreed. Her PC is now dual-boot and she can work with the new system but almost the slightest difference to what she is used to under Windows means a nervous email or even a phone call. She learns and she is willing to try things out but handing her the MX ISO file and tell her to install it on her PC... no way. We're talking light years here. And there are many like her, even younger people in their forties and fifties.

This is not so much a criticism of MX. Some systems are more user-friendly than others and having that choice is a good thing. It is more a reflection on what most people in the "real world" are able to do with their PCs if left to their own devices -- and how they view those machines they do not even begin to understand,

[dreamer]

"Some of the MX utilities include a snapshot tool for making bootable ISO images of our system"

This is something special that many distros lack. At least it was mentioned.

[chrispop99]

Very thorough and positive. I wish he had mentioned the manual where a beginner can learn about the concepts that he indicated made MX somewhat less beginner friendly.

Agreed. I've just posted in the DW comments section my thanks to Jesse for the review, and to draw attention to the suitability of the manual for beginners.

Chris

[richb]

+1

[Jerry3904]

Also, the review gives the impression that apart from things like browsers and kernels (which he called "key components"), the applications in MX repos are all "old' or rather, Debian Stable packages.

I've gone through his package list and their versions, with these results:

--3 packages with difference in major numbers (13%)
--5 packages with difference in minor numbers, excluding kernel (21%)
--2 significant errors by DW (qt, gtk+)

If the first is correct, then we might want to look at those: python, mesa, gcc